Beyond Bond

Printing on an inkjet? You might want to consider looking beyond all-purpose paper for best results.

Inkjet printing is well-suited to a wide variety of applications. Of course, there’s the everyday desktop printing most of us do at home and work, running off letters, labels, photos, and the like. But inkjet printing is also excellent for CAD and engineering drawings and for professional printing jobs such as posters, banners, signs, direct-mail pieces, bank statements, and bills. Inkjet printers can even be used for small print runs of books—even to print a single book. That’s an application in which offset printing would be prohibitively expensive. Inkjet printing has the advantage of allowing for 100-percent variable printing; that is, any part of a printed piece can be customized, and each piece can be different.

If there’s a downside to inkjet printing, it’s that most inkjet technology is aqueous—water-based—which means a lot of water drops onto the paper as it’s printed.
But there are papers specially engineered to handle this quantity of water. These papers can be a good alternative to off-the-shelf stocks such as laser bond or offset, especially if you’re printing graphics-heavy materials that use larger quantities of ink.

Glatfelter’s Pixelle line is an example of paper stock designed specifically for inkjet printing. The line includes products for both desktop and production printing.

Pixelle stocks are available in a variety of weights and color, and divided into three main category types:

Uncoated: Designed to print well with aqueous inkjet.

Treated: Additives are applied to both sides of the paper to improve color and image fastness (and available for dye-based and pigment inks).

Coated: Have water-absorbent coatings on one and both sides and are waterfast.

Pixelle Paper Stats

Come in formats suitable for desktop, wide-format, and production printing

Are available in a variety of shades, finishes, basis weights, and calipers

Can be coated on one or both sides

Offer surface treatments optimized for either dye- or pigment-based inks